Labor:

[Lb2] How progressive policies can lead to larger gender wage disparities. The flip side of this, of course, is that no choice is made in a vacuum. Sometimes this whole discussion feels like a snake eating its tail.

United States:

[US3] Well, this is one way to make sure that graffiti is banned and/or is removed quickly.

[US4] Sarah Jones argues that telling ruralians to move isn’t the answer. I agree it’s not the only answer, but (at least in a different political environment) is something we should think encourage. Not sure this one can be saved. And I would say this one can rot if it weren’t for the subject of the story.

[US5] Carol Graham looks at the optimism of African Americans. Hillary Clinton’s book had a good section on the bitterness of the White Working Class that touched on this.

BEST STORY OF THE DAY: South Dallas middle school started a “Breakfast with Dads” program but many dads couldn’t make it and several students didn't have father figures. The school posted a Facebook request for 50 volunteer fathers… 600 fathers from all backgrounds showed up… pic.twitter.com/y7W9R3qFcs

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The article suggests that it has to do with higher rates of non-participation in the US due to health and disability issues, and with more women in the US leaving the work force when they have kids.Report

I think done correctly this is absolutely true. Yea there’s always some bums out there taking advantage of the system but since I had a kid I’ve been amazed at how expensive its become for my wife to keep working. From daycare costs to the tax hit I get why so many families end up with someone at home. Our system is horrendously outdated.Report

Richard Nixon nixed a universal pre-K plan because Evangelicals thought it would lead to more women working outside the home. They were right. The conservative elements have this fixture of what American society should look like in their head and they are going to do everything they can to impose it. This includes opposing universal pre-K, universal healthcare, and really any safety net feature.Report

No kidding. I actually recommended a female colleague quit when I was discussing her maternity leave insurance coverage. She told me what her daycare expense would be and would have been about equal to her take home pay.Report

Our friend started a day home for just that reason (our daughter went there for a bit too). She looked at her income minus childcare expenses if she stayed at her regular job, compared to her income if she stayed home with her kid and two others whose parents were paying the same rate, and it came out about the same. So she chose the economically equal path that let her spend more time with her kid.

This being Canada, health coverage is way less of a factor than it would likely have been in the states.Report

1. Find two countries that differ on some metric generally believed to be important. 2. Find some policy difference between the two countries. 3. Combine the two to generate a hypothesis: The policy difference identified in step 2 causes the difference in the metric identified in step 1. 4. Do you like the policy implications of the hypothesis generated in step 3? If yes, continue to step 5. If no, return to step 2 and identify another policy difference. 5. QED.Report

It is being used for a very specific purpose here. A purpose that may render any conversation of its usage 5 years ago irrelevant. Shouldn’t we first analyze the appropriateness of its usage here before we go all meta?

Also, thr article looks at long term trends stretching back more than 5 years. Whoops.Report

Something as simple as a paragraph that covers “here’s what’s been going on the last 20 years… and here’s why we’re talking about it as if it’s a problem now when it’s on an upswing despite our not talking about it when it was in decline” would address my complaint.Report

You DID read the article, right? The one that shows a graph going back 20 years documenting the trend and discussing in detail that what is of note is that over the last 5ish years, a fairly sizable lead in this metric that the US held over the UK has become a slight deficit?

The one that ends with:

“Conclusion The US, once comfortably ahead of the UK in labor force participation, has lost all of its ground since the late 1990s. Much of this shift is just due to diverging patterns in US and UK demography. But health and disability is a large driver of the shrinking wedge, as well as discouragement and home / family care among prime-age women. Meanwhile, elderly participation continues to run much higher in the US, with rates of nonparticipation due to retirement far lower in the US.

There are a broad array of possible explanations for these divergences, including differences in health, disability, and family support systems as well as different macroeconomic dynamics. As policymakers in the US continue to look for ways to encourage participation to recover back to its pre-crisis levels, such differences between the US and other countries will prove instructive.”

And none of that is sufficient in explaining to you why this particular writer wrote about this particular topic at this particular time? You think there’s something complain worthy about this? Why is talking about this now and not 5 years ago so bothersome to you?Report

And none of that is sufficient in explaining to you why this particular writer wrote about this particular topic at this particular time?

If the chart shows a trend happening for 20 years and then, at the tail end of the chart, the trend reverses, and then the article is about this awful, awful trend… yeah. I’d kind of like a paragraph talking about why we’d not been talking about it.

But it’s my position that, much like unemployment, it being measurably more ungood than found in Europe is something that would concern American economists rather than something that would make them say “well, some numbers are higher than other numbers, that’s what numbers are for.”Report

That article’s not really about U6. U6 is U3 (headline unemployment) plus marginally attached workers and workers working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs. Of those, only marginally attached workers (currently equal to about 1% of the labor force, and defined as people who indicate that they are willing and able to work but have not looked for work in the past four weeks) are considered labor force nonparticipants.Report

AFAIK it’s just called the labor force participation rate (LFPR). Usually they break it out by demographics, like prime-age (25-54) male or female labor force participation rate. Changes in the LFPR for the whole adult population can be hard to interpret when there are changes in the demographic makeup (aging, baby booms, women entering the labor force, etc.).

The U-1 through U-6 measures are defined here. These explicitly only count people who are in the labor force (i.e. are either employed or willing and able to work and have looked for work in the last four weeks) or marginally attached (willing and able to work and have looked for work in the last year, but not in the last four weeks).

When the unemployment rate (any of them, really; they’re all very strongly correlated) is high, that means people are looking for work and can’t find it, which implies slack in the labor market, which is something the Fed can address. When LFPR is depressed, that could mean any number of things, and it’s not necessarily a problem that can be addressed by macroeconomic policy.Report

Does the rise and fall of LFPR mean anything by itself? Or are there numbers that are good for one context but not another?

From what I saw in thr article, they weren’t necessarily identifying the trend/change as a problem but rather trying to make sense of a big change and pointed to different circumstances in the two counteies.Report

If anything, you’d think that this 20 year trend would reflect poorly on (maybe) Clinton, Bush, or Obama.

Heck, you could even argue that the economy isn’t “officially” Trump’s yet and he’s only reaping the benefits of the tail end of Obama’s governance. If you wanted to argue that, the original article wouldn’t be about Trump in the slightest.Report

Cr1: There is a bad joke about criminals slipping on ice that could be made here. The real reveal is that the safest states are those blue states that conservative politicians like to depict as crime-ridden apocalyptic hellholes.

Cr3: I’ve always wondered if the Viking berserk was a similar phenomenon to the running amok that existed in the Malay world.Report

I can’t think of any major campus-speech related controversy that was about someone complaining about not being invited to speak, or not being paid. They’ve all been about cases where an agreement was reached between the speaker and some on-campus organization, and then the speakers were violently harassed, shouted down, or had the invitations rescinded by university administrators due to pressure from students other than the ones who had invited them.

I get that satirists have some creative license, but there has to be some element of truth. This fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the controversy, and in doing so crosses the line into propaganda.Report

IDK that much about trucking, but isn’t this basically the chickens coming home to roost on the owner-operator model?

Forcing everyone to be an independent contractor means that the job is much less attractive for potential new workers. And now that most of the drivers are owner/operators, they have very different incentives than the people whose goods need shipping.Report

Your wish is my command, my friend… Interesting article. I can’t actually speak with much authority on the state of the industry as a whole. Forests and trees sort of thing. Anyway, a few observations/data points:

A couple years ago I was mentoring new drivers. This amounts to taking a new guy — usually a graduate from driving school with a brand new CDL — out on the road for ~4 weeks to get some experience actually doing the job. Buy me a beer next time I’m out Seattle way and I’ll describe that fresh hell for ya. Anyway, I was talking to one of the guys running that program and he told me we had to hire and train 19,000 new drivers every year to keep 18,000 trucks on the road. The turnover is that bad. I’ve been with the company ~6 years and that makes me a senior driver and, yes, that gets me perqs.

2. The company just announced a pay increase shortly although they didn’t specify how much. So, indeterminate yay!

3. I’ve been noticing since a couple months before the pre-christmas rush that I’ve been getting a lot of load assignments that are already late when they come to me. Like we’re having trouble covering our freight.

So yeah, that article rings true. And this has been an exceptionally crappy winter for weather and weather delays. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it this bad in the 20 years I’ve been driving.Report

I’d say the lifestyle more than anything else. At least doing what I do, over-the-road (OTR), you’re away from home for 3 or more weeks at a stretch. Plays hell with family life or just having a girl/boyfriend.Report

Fr1: So, one of the traditional arguments for gun regulation goes something along the lines of “The Founding Fathers wrote the 2nd amendment in a time where the most powerful guns were single-shot muskets. The technology of firearms has changed in the last few hundred years so does the rationale of the 2nd amendment still apply?”

A traditional counter to that argument has been “The technology of speech has changed and awful lot since the founding, too. Do we also need to rethink the first amendment?” It’s supposed to be an argument ad absurdem. But I think for a lot of folks, including me, the response has become “that might actually be a good idea.”

Lb2: I favor adopting that 7% number as a rough estimate of how much of the pay gap can be ascribed to not our fault/not our problem. If people want to talk about “pay gap is down to women’s skills and choices blah blah blah”, I’m gonna go: Let’s look at the numbers. When your pay gap is at 15%, and Uber’s is at 7%, you still have an 8% pay gap to answer for and until that’s gone I’m not going to shut up about sexism in pay.Report

Wa4 – Here’s(PDF) the specific Rumsfeld memo. It’s far too generous to credit him for asking the question “are we generating terrrorists faster than we kill them?”; he’s only asking if we are killing (or causing to quit) more terrorists than the “madrassas and radical clerics” are recruiting.

The infuriating thing about this memo is that he’s asking huge existential questions about the wars happeing on his watch, and all this nearly two years into the Afghanistan campaign and several months into the Iraq one.Report

I’m always startled by the lack of rigorous understanding of history that prevails in our political class and the poli-sci experts they rely on. Maybe the former has rendered the latter too ideological for real reflection. It’s not like these kinds of questions haven’t been asked in well recorded fashion for 2500 years. It’s mind boggling to me that a memo like that gets written only after the big decisions have been made.

Either way there seems to be too much emphasis on solving big problems largely out of control and not enough on mitigating/avoiding catastrophes. We can’t stop Islamist extremism, but we can probably limit our appeal as a target by applying some basic Westphalian principles. You know, stay out of other peoples’ civil wars, stop putting our fingers on the scale for the Israelis and the Saudi monarchy in international affairs. I know all thats just crazy hippie talk though.Report

Ted Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law? At Harvard, he formed the world’s snottiest study group with Alma mater and grade requirements. He is married to a managing director of Goldman Sachs.

He called Democrats, the Party of Lisa Simpson.

How does he do this with a straight face? How do his supporters nod in affirmation?Report

I’m not suspending him because he has to write Sunday! etc. (plus, to be frank, he’s the one who brings me caffeine when I’m laid up in bed, and I’m currently laid up in bed, and I *really* appreciate the caffeine).

But he has been told not to comment on anything at all until tomorrow, OR ELSE (I’ll suspend him for the week and write his content myself).Report

From August 2018 through February 2019, AVENATTI defrauded a client (“Victim-1”) by diverting money owed to Victim-1 to AVENATTI’s control and use. After assisting Victim-1 in securing a book contract, AVENATTI allegedly stole a significant portion of Victim-1’s advance on that contract. He did so by, among other things, sending a fraudulent and unauthorized letter purporting to contain Victim-1’s signature to Victim-1’s literary agent, which instructed the agent to send payments not to Victim-1 but to a bank account controlled by AVENATTI. As alleged, Victim-1 had not signed or authorized the letter, and did not even know of its existence.

Specifically, prior to Victim-1’s literary agent wiring the second of four installment payments due to Victim-1 as part of the book advance, AVENATTI sent a letter to Victim-1’s literary agent purportedly signed by Victim-1 that instructed the literary agent to send all future payments to a client trust account in Victim-1’s name and controlled by AVENATTI. The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which AVENATTI promptly began spending for his own purposes, including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery, online retailers, payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, and insurance. When Victim-1 began inquiring of AVENATTI as to why Victim-1 had not received the second installment, AVENATTI lied to Victim-1, telling Victim-1 that he was still attempting to obtain the payment from Victim-1’s publisher. Approximately one month after diverting the payment, AVENATTI used funds recently received from another source to pay $148,750 to Victim-1, so that Victim-1 would not realize that AVENATTI had previously taken and used Victim-1’s money.

Approximately one week later, pursuant to AVENATTI’s earlier fraudulent instructions, the literary agent sent another payment of $148,750 of Victim-1’s book advance to the client account controlled by AVENATTI. AVENATTI promptly began spending the money for his own purposes, including to make payments to individuals with whom AVENATTI had a personal relationship, to make a monthly lease payment on a luxury automobile, and to pay for airfare, dry cleaning, hotels, restaurants and meals, payroll, and insurance costs. Moreover, to conceal his scheme, and despite repeated requests to AVENATTI, as Victim-1’s lawyer, for assistance in obtaining the book payment that Victim-1 believed was missing, AVENATTI led Victim-1 to believe that Victim-1’s publisher was refusing to make the payment to the literary agent, when, as AVENATTI knew, the publisher had made the payment to the literary agent, who had then sent the money to AVENATTI pursuant to AVENATTI’s fraudulent instructions.

Here are my principal conclusions:1. Attorney General Barr has deliberately misrepresented Mueller’s report.2. President Trump has engaged in impeachable conduct.3. Partisanship has eroded our system of checks and balances.4. Few members of Congress have read the report.

Rep. Justin Amash, a critic of President Trump who entertained a run against him in 2020, became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct.”

The Michigan lawmaker, often the lone Trump dissenter on his side of the aisle, shared his conclusions in a lengthy Twitter thread after reviewing the full special counsel report.

Amash wrote that after reading the 448-page report, he’d concluded that not only did Robert S. Mueller’s team show Trump attempting to obstruct justice, but that Attorney General William Barr had “deliberately misrepresented” the findings and that few members of Congress had even read it. “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment,” Amash wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The president often says the report found “no collusion, no obstruction,” though neither is true. Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, which did interfere in the 2016 election. He did not rule on the obstruction of justice question, saying it was something Congress should determine.

Amash, who was first elected to Congress in 2010, declined on Sunday to rule out a possible 2020 presidential run as a Libertarian candidate.

"Well, I would never rule anything out. That's not on my radar right now," he said of a 2020 bid to Tapper. "But I think that it is important that we have someone in there who is presenting a vision for America that is different from what these two parties are presenting."

Amash told Tapper he believes there is a "wild amount of partisan rhetoric on both sides" and that "Congress is totally broken."

"I think that we need to return to basic American principles, talk about what we have in common as a people -- because I believe we have a lot in common as Americans -- and try to move forward together, rather than fighting each other all the time," Amash said.

Question remains, is Justin Amash going to join any Democrat effort to curtail the president, or is he using this as prelude to something else -- such as his own run for the White House? Drama.

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Elizabeth Warren Is Rooting for Daenerys Targaryen in ‘Game of Thrones’

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a Game of Thrones fan, and her favorite character is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, who Warren says, “has been my favorite from the first moment she walked through fire.” We learned this in a column Warren wrote for The Cut published Sunday evening.

In the piece, Warren outlines her reasons for her fandom. Daenerys is fair, she fights for the people, and she wants to end slavery. But in talking about Daenerys, Warren can also, subtly, talk about herself. Like the paragraph below, in which she describes the Dragon Queen—or is she describing herself?

“This is a revolutionary idea, in Westeros or anywhere else. A queen who declares that she doesn’t serve the interests of the rich and powerful? A ruler who doesn’t want to control the political system but to break the system as it is known? It’s no wonder that the people she meets in Westeros are skeptical. Skeptical, because they’ve seen another kind of woman on the Iron Throne: the villain we love to hate, Queen Cersei of Casterly Rock.”

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If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly: if the assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'ld jump the life to come. But [...]